London, UK – January 19, 2023 – Today, American Express Global Business Travel (Amex GBT), the world’s leading B2B travel platform, announced a new agreement with climate tech company CHOOOSE to integrate its carbon emissions calculations across Amex GBT’s travel booking and reporting tools. The aim is to enhance Amex GBT’s sustainability solutions by increasing the precision and consistency of greenhouse gas emissions data and to build architecture for future carbon compensation.
Mark McSpadden, Amex GBT’s VP of product strategy and user experience, said: “Flights are the single largest contributor to business travel emissions, so our first priority is to help our clients keep up with evolving standards for calculating aviation emissions. We are integrating solutions that give clients more choice, enhance our tools with more granular CO2 calculations, and allow us to serve up robust, consistent CO2 data across our suite of booking, tracking and reporting tools. This helps educate travelers and drive real progress in sustainable travel.”
Amex GBT displays carbon emission data in its online booking tool, Neo, to help travelers make educated, sustainable decisions. The integration will replace current calculation mechanisms used in Neo with seamlessly integrated emissions calculations from CHOOOSE.
The new solution will let travel managers select a preferred calculation methodology and seamlessly apply that preference across online booking, mobile app, and itinerary solutions. In Amex GBT reporting tools, travel managers will be able to apply CHOOOSE-powered emissions calculations to trips booked since 2019 for tracking, analyzing and managing carbon footprints.
With the integration, travelers will see consistent trip emissions values in the search results, itineraries1, and in the Amex GBT Mobile app for past and future trips. This will provide more visibility into the travelers’ individual carbon footprint, helping them better understand the environmental impact of travel and influence their booking behavior.
Integrating with CHOOOSE gives Amex GBT access to industry-accepted air emissions methodologies. For example, these include ICAO, UK BEIS, US EPA and France ADEME2. Amex GBT also integrates with additional data sources such as IATA CO2 Connect based on IATA RECOMMENDED PRACTICE-RP 1726. This will give clients the flexibility to include more criteria such as distance, fuel burn, occupancy, cabin class, and belly cargo for a high degree of accuracy. In addition, where applicable by methodology, customers can select their preferences on radiative forcing and well-to-wake, which is critical for measuring the benefits of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). Emissions data for additional travel segments such as rail, car, and hotel will follow. Additional methodologies and features/enhancements will be available over time.
The integration with CHOOOSE is an important step in building the architecture for additional carbon compensation solutions across the Amex GBT portfolio of products and services. Amex GBT clients will have options to compensate for their business travel emissions via a diverse portfolio of climate solutions, integrated seamlessly into their booking and reporting tools. For example, these will include carbon offsets and insets, carbon removals, and emerging decarbonization solutions. CHOOOSE data will also support sustainable meeting and events (M&E) solutions providing a consistent client experience with reliable data across Amex GBT’s services. Egencia will also integrate certain CHOOOSE-powered emissions calculations into its business travel platform, including its reporting tool.
CHOOOSE CEO and founder Andreas Slettvoll said: “We are very happy to support Amex GBT – and the millions of travelers they serve – in creating an industry-leading set of tools to track, understand, and address the carbon footprint associated with business travel. Together, we are taking an end-to-end approach with a deep focus on delivering calculation methodologies in line with the latest industry guidance and seamless access to both immediately available and frontier climate solutions.”
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Editor’s Note:
Amex GBT pursues three key targets on environmental sustainability: establishing Amex GBT as the marketplace for green business travel, executing its 2021 commitment to set science-based targets by the end of 2023, and driving aviation toward net-zero carbon by 2050. Read our annual Environmental, Social, Governance report for more info on Amex GBT’s sustainability commitments.
About American Express Global Business Travel
American Express Global Business Travel is the world’s leading B2B travel platform, providing software and services to manage travel, expenses, and meetings & events for companies of all sizes. We have built the most valuable marketplace in B2B travel to deliver unrivalled choice, value and experiences. With travel professionals in more than 140 countries, our customers and travelers enjoy the powerful backing of American Express Global Business Travel.
Visit amexglobalbusinesstravel.com for more information about Amex GBT, and follow @amexgbt on Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.
About CHOOOSE
CHOOOSE provides the leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform empowering businesses to integrate climate action into customer experiences. Enterprise partners in sectors like aviation, travel and logistics deploy CHOOOSE to build, manage and report on customer-centric climate programs that embed climate action wherever they interact with their consumer or corporate customers. Headquartered in Oslo, Norway, CHOOOSE has enterprise partners and employees around the world. Learn more at www.chooose.today.